Why do some secessionist claims turn violent and others stay peaceful? This study elucidates the role of inequality and diversionary tactics of states in secessionist violence. Horizontal inequality increases the grievances of minorities and fuels rebellion. States with high vertical inequality prefer to suppress peripheries instead of increasing redistribution and alleviating their material grievances. States shun redistributing toward peripheral regions because sharing with one group prompts demands for redistribution among other groups, including the dominant group. Fearing resource reallocation at the national scale and potential loss of their elevated social status, the elites opt for violent solutions for secessionist crises. Using a new dataset on self-determination movements I test these conjectures and find strong support for them.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Acemoglu, D, Naidu, S, Restrepo, P & Robinson, JA (2015) Democracy, redistribution, and inequality. In: AtkinsonABBourguignonF (eds) Handbook of Income Distribution, vol. 2B, Boston, MA: Elsevier.
2.
AlesinaABaqirREasterlyW (1999) Public goods and ethnic divisions. The Quarterly Journal of Economics114(4): 1243–1284.
3.
BabonesSJ (2008) Income inequality and population health: Correlation and causality. Social Science & Medicine66(7): 1614–1626.
4.
Bækgaard, M, Christensen, J, Madsen, JK & Mikkelsen, KS (2020) Rallying around the flag in times of COVID-19: Societal lockdown and trust in democratic institutions. Journal of Behavioral Public Administration3(2): 1–12.
5.
BaraC (2014) Incentives and opportunities A complexity-oriented explanation of violent ethnic conflict. Journal of Peace Research51(6): 696–710.
6.
BatesDMaechlerMBolkerB (2015) Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software67(1): 1–48.
7.
Berman, E, Callen, M, Felter, JH & Shapiro, JN (2011) Do working men rebel? Insurgency and unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines. Journal of Conflict Resolution55(4): 496–528.
8.
BlomdahlM (2017) Diversionary theory of war and the case study design: President Clinton’s strikes on Iraq and Yugoslavia. Armed Forces & Society43(3): 545–565.
9.
BoixC (2003) Democracy and Redistribution. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
10.
Bol, D, Giani, M, Blais, A & Loewen, PJ (2021) et al. (2020) The effect of COVID-19 lockdowns on political support: Some good news for democracy?European Journal of Political Research 60: 497–505.
11.
BoltJZandenJL (2014) The maddison project: Collaborative research on historical national accounts. The Economic History Review67(3): 627–651.
Bueno De Mesquita, B, Smith, A, Siverson, RM & Morrow, JD (2003) The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
14.
BunceV (1999) Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
15.
ButtAI (2017) Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy Against Separatists. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
16.
CarreriMDubeO (2017) Do natural resources influence who comes to power, and how?The Journal of Politics79(2): 502–518.
17.
CarterDBSignorinoCS (2010) Back to the future: Modeling time dependence in binary data. Political Analysis18(3): 271–292.
18.
CedermanLEWeidmannNBGleditschKS (2011) Horizontal inequalities and ethnonationalist civil war: A global comparison. American Political Science Review105(3): 478–495.
CogginsB (2011) Friends in high places: International politics and the emergence of states from secessionism. International Organization65(3): 433–467.
21.
CollierPHoefflerA (2004) Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic Papers56(4): 563–595.
22.
CollierPHoefflerARohnerD (2009) Beyond greed and grievance: Feasibility and civil war. Oxford Economic Papers61(1): 1–27.
23.
CoppedgeMGerringJKnutsenCH, et al. (2020) V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v10. Technical report. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
24.
CunninghamKG (2013) Understanding strategic choice: The determinants of civil war and nonviolent campaign in self-determination disputes. Journal of Peace Research50(3): 291–304.
25.
DahlRA (1972) Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. London, UK: Yale University Press.
26.
DohoG (2020) From literary concept to self-proclaimed state: Three generations of Anglophone-Cameroonians at war. Journal of the African Literature Association14(2): 216–235.
27.
DzutsatiV (2021a) Geographies of hybrid war: Rebellion and foreign intervention in Ukraine. Small Wars & Insurgencies32(3): 441–468.
28.
DzutsatiV (2021b) Social alienation and cultural distance in the context of secession in the south Caucasus. Nations and Nationalism27( 4): 1127–1148. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12762.
29.
ElverenAY (2012) Military spending and income inequality: Evidence on cointegration and causality for Turkey, 1963–2007. Defence and Peace Economics23(3): 289–301.
30.
FazalTGriffithsRD (2008) State of one’s own: The rise of secession since world War II. A. Brown Journal of World Affairs15(1): 199–209.
31.
FeenstraRCInklaarRTimmerMP (2015) The next generation of the penn world table. American Economic Review105(10): 3150–3182.
32.
ForsbergE (2013) Do ethnic dominoes fall? Evaluating domino effects of granting territorial concessions to separatist groups. International Studies Quarterly57(2): 329–340.
33.
FosterDMKellerJW (2010) Rallies and the “first image” leadership psychology, scapegoating proclivity, and the diversionary use of force. Conflict Management and Peace Science27(5): 417–441.
34.
GalbraithJKKrytynskaiaLWangQ (2004) The experience of rising inequality in Russia and China during the transition. The European Journal of Comparative Economics1(1): 87–106.
35.
GallCDe WaalT (1997) Chechnya: A Small Victorious War. London: Pan Macmillan.
36.
Girardin, Hunziker, Cederman, Bormann & Vogt, Zurich (2015) GROWup: Geographical Research On War, Unified Platform. ETH Zurich. http://growup.ethz.ch/.
37.
GoertzGDiehlP (1992) Territorial Changes and International Conflict. London: Routledge.
38.
GreenhillBWardMDSacksA (2011) The separation plot: A new visual method for evaluating the fit of binary models. American Journal of Political Science55(4): 991–1002.
39.
GriffithsRD (2014) Secession and the invisible hand of the international system. Review of International Studies40(3): 559–581.
40.
GriffithsRD (2015) Between dissolution and blood: How administrative lines and categories shape secessionist outcomes. International Organization69(3): 731–751.
41.
GurrTR (1970) Why Men Rebel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
42.
HaberSMenaldoV (2011) Do natural resources fuel authoritarianism? A reappraisal of the resource curse. American Political Science Review105(01): 1–26.
43.
HechterM (1999) Internal colonialism: The Celtic fringe in British national development. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
44.
HechterM (1992) The dynamics of secession. Acta Sociologica35(4): 267–283.
45.
HechterM (2000) Containing Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
46.
Hegre, H, Ellingsen, T, Gates, S & Gleditsch, NP (2001) Toward a democratic civil peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992. American Political Science Review95(1): 33–48. http://www.paulhensel.org/icowcol.html
47.
HenselPR (2014) ICOW Colonial History Data Set, version 1.0. Technical report. University of North Texas.
48.
HeraclidesA (1990) Secessionist minorities and external involvement. International Organization44(03): 341–378.
49.
HorowitzDL (1985) Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
50.
HorowitzSYeM (2013) Nationalist and power-seeking leadership preferences in ethno-territorial conflicts: Theory, a measurement framework, and applications to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Civil Wars15(4): 508–530.
51.
HouleC (2017) Inequality, ethnic diversity, and redistribution. The Journal of Economic Inequality15(1): 1–23.
52.
HuberEStephensJD (2014) Income inequality and redistribution in post-industrial democracies: Demographic, economic and political determinants. Socio-Economic Review12(2): 245–267.
53.
JacksonK (2013) Diversity and the distribution of public goods in Sub-Saharan Africa. Journal of African Economies22(3): 437–462.
54.
JohnsonDDPToftMD (2014) Grounds for war: The evolution of territorial conflict. International Security38(3): 7–38.
55.
KanatKB (2012) “War on terror” as a diversionary strategy: Personifying minorities as terrorists in the People’s Republic of China. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs32(4): 507–527.
56.
KecmanovicD (2005) The rational and the irrational in nationalism. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism5(1): 2–26.
57.
KleinGRTokdemirE (2019) Domestic diversion: Selective targeting of minority out-groups. Conflict management and peace science36(1): 20–41.
KuhnPMWeidmannNB (2015) Unequal we fight: Between- and within-group inequality and ethnic civil war. Political Science Research and Methods3(03): 543–568.
60.
LacinaBGleditschNP (2005) Monitoring trends in global combat: A new dataset of battle deaths. European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie21(2–3): 145–166.
61.
LakeDAO’MahonyA (2004) The incredible shrinking state explaining change in the territorial size of countries. Journal of Conflict Resolution48(5): 699–722.
62.
LeifeldP (2013) Texreg: Conversion of statistical model output in R to LATEX and HTML tables. Journal of Statistical Software55(8): 1–24. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v55/i08/.
63.
LevyJS (1997) Prospect theory, rational choice, and international relations. International Studies Quarterly41(1): 87–112.
64.
LevyJSVakiliLI (1992) Diversionary action by authoritarian regimes: Argentina in the Falklands/Malvinas case. In: MidlarskyMI (ed.) The Internationalization of Communal Strife. London: Taylor & Francis, 118–146.
65.
LinESAliHE (2009) Military spending and inequality: Panel Granger causality testJournal of Peace Research46(5): 671–685.
66.
LujalaP (2009) Deadly combat over natural resources gems, petroleum, drugs, and the severity of armed civil conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution53(1): 50–71.
67.
ManekinDGrossmanGMittsT (2019) Contested ground: Disentangling material and symbolic attachment to disputed territory. Political Science Research and Methods7(4): 679–697.
68.
Martinez MachainCRosenbergL (2018) Domestic diversion and strategic behavior by minority groups. Conflict Management and Peace Science35(5): 427–450.
69.
McDermottRFowlerJHSmirnovO (2008) On the evolutionary origin of prospect theory preferences. The Journal of Politics70(02): 335–350.
70.
McLaughlin MitchellSThyneCL (2010) Contentious issues as opportunities for diversionary behavior. Conflict Management and Peace Science27(5): 461–485.
71.
MehlerA (2013) Consociationalism for weaklings, autocracy for muscle men? Determinants of constitutional reform in divided societies. Civil Wars15(sup1): 21–43.
72.
MeromG (2003) How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam. New York: Cambridge University Press.
73.
MidtbøT (2018) Democracy and the demand for government redistribution: A survey analysis. European Journal of Political Research57(4): 829–844.
74.
MiguelEGugertyMK (2005) Ethnic diversity, social sanctions, and public goods in Kenya. Journal of Public Economics89(11): 2325–2368.
75.
MorganTCAndersonCJ (1999) Domestic support and diversionary external conflict in Great Britain, 1950–1992. The Journal of Politics61(03): 799–814.
76.
OakesA (2006) Diversionary war and Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. Security Studies15(3): 431–463.
77.
ØstbyG (2008) Polarization, horizontal inequalities and violent civil conflict. Journal of Peace Research45(2): 143–162.
78.
PaskovMDewildeC (2012) Income inequality and solidarity in Europe. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility30(4): 415–432.
79.
Pedersen, R & Mutz, D (2019) Attitudes toward economic inequality: The illusory agreement. Political Science Research and Methods7(4): 835–851.
80.
PetterssonTÖbergM (2020) Organized violence, 1989–2019. Journal of Peace Research57(4): 597–613.
81.
PikettyT (2003) Income inequality in France, 1901–1998. Journal of Political Economy111(5): 1004–1042.
82.
Porat, R, Tamir, M, Wohl, MJ, Gur, T & Halperin, E (2019) Motivated emotion and the rally around the flag effect: Liberals are motivated to feel collective angst (like conservatives) when faced with existential threat. Cognition and Emotion33(3): 480–491.
83.
RussettB (1990) Economic decline, electoral pressure, and the initiation of interstate conflict. In: GochmanCSSabroskyAN (eds) Prisoners of war? Nation-states in the Modern era. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 123–140.
84.
SambanisNMilanovicB (2014) Explaining regional autonomy differences in decentralized countries. Comparative Political Studies47(13): 1830–1855.
85.
SambanisNGermannMSchädelA (2018) SDM: A new data set on self-determination movements with an application to the reputational theory of conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution62(3): 665–686.
86.
Siroky, D, Warner, CM, Filip-Crawford, G, Berlin, A & Neuberg, SL (2020) Grievances and rebellion: Comparing relative deprivation and horizontal inequality. Conflict Management and Peace Science37(6): 694–715.
87.
SnyderT (2018) The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
88.
Solt, F (2016) The standardized world income inequality database. Social Science Quarterly.
89.
Solt, F (2019) The Standardized World Income Inequality Database, Versions 8–9. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LM4OWF, Harvard Dataverse, V6; SWIIDv9_1
90.
SorensJ (2012) Secessionism: Identity, Interest, and Strategy. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press.
91.
SpruytH (2005) Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
92.
StevensPDietscheE (2008) Resource curse: An analysis of causes, experiences and possible ways forward. Energy Policy36(1): 56–65.
93.
TararA (2006) Diversionary incentives and the bargaining approach to war. International Studies Quarterly50(1): 169–188.
94.
TirJ (2010) Territorial diversion: Diversionary theory of war and territorial conflict. The Journal of Politics72(2): 413–425.
95.
TirJJasinskiM (2008) Domestic-Level diversionary theory of War targeting ethnic minorities. Journal of Conflict Resolution52(5): 641–664.
96.
WalterBF (2006) Building reputation: Why governments fight some separatists but not others. American Journal of Political Science50(2): 313–330.
97.
WeidmannNB (2016) Geography as motivation and opportunity group concentration and ethnic conflict. Journal of Conflict Resolution53(4): 526–543.
98.
WickhamH (2009) ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. http://ggplot2.org.
99.
WilkinsonRGPickettKE (2007) The problems of relative deprivation: Why some societies do better than others. Social Science & Medicine65(9): 1965–1978.
100.
YitzhakiS (1979) Relative deprivation and the gini coefficient. The Quarterly Journal of Economics93(2): 321–324.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
